Osho on Love and Boredom

Nothing is boring, nothing is repetitive and monotonous—you are, and you bring your quality to everything that you do. No act is boring in itself, and no act can be nonboring in itself—it is you who make it boring or non-boring. And the same act can be boredom to you this moment and the next moment it may become a blissful thing.

Not that the act has changed; your mood, the quality you bring to the act, has changed. So remember, you are not bored because repetitive acts have to be done. Rather, on the contrary, you are bored—that’s why they appear repetitive.

For instance, children want to repeat things. They go on playing the same game again and again. You get bored. What are they doing? The same game again and again? They go on asking for the same story. They enjoy it again and again, and they say, ‘Tell me that story again.’

What is the matter? You cannot conceive it. It looks stupid. It is not. They are so alive that nothing is repetitive for them. You are dead and everything is repetitive for you. They go on repeating the same game. The whole day they can go on, and if you stop them they will scream and cry and they will resist you, saying, ‘Don’t destroy our game.’ And you cannot understand what they are doing the whole day.

They have a different quality of consciousness. Nothing is repetitive for them. They enjoy it so much that the very enjoyment changes the quality, and then they enjoy it again -- and they enjoy it more, because now they know the know-how. The third time they enjoy it even more, because now they are acquainted with everything. They go on enjoying; their enjoyment goes on increasing. Your enjoyment goes on decreasing. What is the matter? Is the act itself boring, or is something wrong with your mode of being, your mode of consciousness?

Look at it from another angle. Two lovers will go on repeating the same acts every day. They will kiss and they will hug—they are the same acts. And they would like to go on doing that ad infinitum. If you give them time, they will go on repeating to the very end of existence. Looking at two lovers, you will get bored. What are they doing? -- the same thing every day? And if you give them the whole day, they will go on hugging, loving, embracing, kissing. What are they doing?

Lovers have again become children. That’s why love is so innocent—it makes you a child again. Now they are enjoying the game.

They are again children. The whole nonsense of maturity they have thrown. They are playing with each other’s body, and to them nothing is repetitive. Each kiss is something absolutely new, unique. It was never so before, it will never be the same again. Each moment of love has its own individual existence, non-repetitive; that’s why they goon enjoying.

The economic law of diminishing returns doesn’t apply to it. For love, there is no law of diminishing returns; rather, increasing returns. That’s why economists cannot understand love, mathematicians cannot understand love. All those who are efficient in calculation cannot understand love, because this is absurd: it defies all laws, all mathematics—it goes on increasing.

Two lovers appear to us as if they are repeating. To them, they are not repeating. But to a prostitute the law of economics will apply, because for her, love is not love, it is a commodity—something to be sold, something which can be purchased. So if you go and kiss a prostitute, for her it is boredom, repetition, and some day she will say. ‘This is nonsense. I am bored of being kissed and kissing the whole day. It is intolerable.’ She will say that it is a repetitive act.

That’s what I want to show you—the distinction. For a lover it is not repetitive; for a prostitute it is repetitive. So, really, the act itself is not repetitive; it is your quality that you bring to it. Whatsoever you do, if you love it, it will never be repetitive. If you love your doings, your acts, there will be no boredom. But you don’t love. I go on talking to you every day. I can go on ad infinitum. I love it. It is not repetitive for me. From eternity to eternity I can go on talking with you. Communication, to communicate with your heart, is love to me. It is not a repetitive act, otherwise I would get bored.

If your act becomes creation, you will not be bored. And your act becomes creation if you love it. But the basic difficulty is that you cannot love whatsoever you do because you hate yourself—that’s the problem. So whatsoever you do, you hate it, because basically you hate yourself. You have not yet accepted yourself, you have not yet thanked existence for your existence.

You have not accepted yourself so how can you accept your acts? Love yourself. Accept yourself as you are. Because action is secondary—it flows from your being. If I love myself then whatsoever I do, I love it. And if I don’t love it, I stop it. What is the need to continue?

But you don’t love, and the source is unloved so the products of that source cannot be loved.

Whatsoever you do—you may be an engineer or you may be a doctor or a chemist or a scientist—whatsoever you do, you will bring hate to it. Your hate makes it repetitive. You hate it, and you go on finding excuses for why you are doing it. You say, ‘I am doing it for my wife, for my children.’ And your father was doing it for you, and his father was doing it for him, and your children will do it for their children, and no one will enjoy life.

These are tricks. You are simply a coward. You cannot escape from it, because it gives you security, safety, income, bank balance. Because you are a coward, you cannot stop doing it and you cannot start doing that which you love. Then you go on putting everything on your children, on your wife, and they are also doing the same.

No one is really existing for himself. No one loves himself enough to exist for himself. Then everything goes wrong. The source is poisoned, and then all that comes out of that source is poisoned. And don’t think that if you change your job, you will love it. No, you will bring your quality to the new job also. In the beginning it may be a sensation, something new, but sooner or later you will settle down and it will be the same.

Change yourself, love yourself, and love whatsoever you do; howsoever small it makes no difference.

Look at life—life enjoys repetition. The seasons move in a circle. The sun moves in a circle—every day, every morning, it arises. And the summer comes and the winter comes and the rains come and they go on moving. In a deep way the whole existence is repetitively moving. It seems creation is just like a child’s play. The trees are not bored, and the sky is not bored. The sky never says, ‘Now, again the clouds?’ For so many, many millennia the sky has been seeing the clouds—every rainy season the clouds come and they start moving. Look at life? It is repetitive.

The word is not good; the word ‘repetitive’ is not good. Rather it will be better to say it goes on playing the same game. It enjoys it so much that it wants to repeat it again. And it goes on increasing; it goes on moving towards a climax. Why does man get bored with repetition? Not because repetition is boring, but because you are so bored that everything will be boring.

So really it is not a question that this act makes you bored or that act makes you bored, or repetition or monotony or tedious jobs make you bored. The real thing is that you are bored whether you do something or not. If you are simply relaxing in a chair you will be bored. Not doing anything you will be bored. You will say, ‘There is nothing to do and I am bored. Nothing to do—I am bored.’

The whole week you are bored because of the tedious job, and on the week-end you are bored because there is nothing to do. The whole life you are bored because of doing a repetitive job in a factory, in an office, in a shop. Then when you retire you are bored, because now there is nothing to do. It is not a question of anything else. Something is not creating boredom in you; you are bored, and you go on bringing your boredom to everything that you touch.

You have heard of King Midas—whatsoever he touched became gold. You are also a King Midas—whatsoever you touch becomes boredom. You have an alchemical touch: you can change everything into boredom; everything, I say.

Don’t think of changing jobs, actions; think of changing the quality of your consciousness. Be more loving to yourself. The first thing to remember is to be more loving to yourself.

The moralists have poisoned the whole world. They say, ‘Don’t love yourself. This is selfishness.’ They say, ‘Love others, don’t love yourself. The love of the self is sin.’

And I say to you that this is absolute nonsense—and not only nonsense; it is dangerous nonsense. Unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody, it is impossible, because a man who is not in love with himself cannot be in love with anybody. If you are in love with yourself, only then can your overflowing love reach somebody. A man who has not loved himself will hate himself, and if you hate yourself, how can you love anybody? You will hate others also. You can only pretend. And when you cannot love yourself, how do you expect others to love you?

Everyone is condemned in his own eyes. The whole moralistic teaching gives you only one thing: techniques of self condemnation—how to condemn yourself, how you are bad, a criminal, guilty, a sinner.

If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody. The love must happen at home first—you are the home—and only when it overflows can it reach to others. And when it overflows, it overflows into your acts, into whatsoever you do. Whether you paint or make a shoe or anything—just cleaning the street—whatsoever you do, if you are in deep love, if you are in deep love with yourself, it flows into everything you do. It flows even when you are not doing anything. It goes on flowing, it becomes your very existence, and then nothing is boring.

People come to me; sometimes very sympathetically some friends ask me, ‘The whole day you are sitting in one room, not even looking out of the window. Don’t you get bored?’ I am with myself. Why should I get bored? They say, ‘Just sitting alone, don’t you get bored?’

If I hate myself I will get bored, because you cannot live with a person you hate. You get bored with yourself. You cannot be alone. Even if you are alone for a few moments you get fidgety, you get uncomfortable, an uneasiness comes into your being. You long to meet someone, because you cannot remain with yourself. The company is so boring—your own company. You cannot look at your own face. You cannot touch your hand lovingly; no—impossible.

They ask me—and their asking is relevant to their own reference, because they will get bored if they are alone—they ask me, ‘Don’t you go out sometimes?’ There is no need. Sometimes they ask me, ‘People come to you with the same problem again and again. Don’t you get bored?’

Because everyone has the same problem. You are so unoriginal you cannot even create an original problem. Everyone has the same problem. Some are related with your love, with your sex, with your peace of mind, with your confusion, or something else—some psychology, some pathology, something. So friends ask me, ‘Don’t you get bored?’ I never get bored, because each individual is unique to me, and because of the individual, the problem he brings is not a repetition because the context is different, the individual is different. You come with your love problem, another comes with his love problem: both look similar but they are not, because two individuals are so different—their difference changes the quality of the problem.

Each individual is so unique that he cannot be put with anyone else. No category can be made. But then you have to have a very keen awareness to penetrate to the very root where the individual is unique. Otherwise, on the surface everyone is alike. Just on the surface everyone is alike, with the same problems, but if you penetrate deep, if you are alert and ready to move with the person to the deeper core of his being, the deeper you go, the more original, individual and unique a phenomenon comes into being. If you can see to the very center, this person before you is unrepeatable. He has never been before, he will never be again. He is just unique. And the mystery then overfills you -- the mystery of the unique person.

Nothing is a repetition if you know how to penetrate, how to be loving and alert. Otherwise everything is repetitive. You are bored because you have a consciousness which creates boredom. Change the consciousness, and there will be no boredom. But you go on changing objects—that will not make any difference.

Excerpted from Osho’s The Book of Secrets, discourses on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, the book of 112 meditation techniques